arXiv subjects

Yuanwei Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Yuanwei Liu.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS): Architecture Designs, Opportunities, and Outlook

Flexible-antenna systems have recently attracted significant research attention due to their potential to intelligently reconfigure wireless channels. However, the current flexible-antenna systems still suffer from fundamental limitations, such as free-space path loss and line-of-sight blockage. This article introduces a novel flexible-antenna system, termed the Pinching-Antenna SyStem (PASS). PASS adopts the dielectric waveguides as the primary transmission medium and radiates signals into free space by flexibly pinching discrete dielectric particles, referred to as pinching antennas, along the waveguide. By combining the strengths of both wireless and wired communication, PASS effectively mitigates inherent wireless limitations while offering high antenna reconfigurability. This article reviews the key features of PASS in comparison with conventional wireless systems, analyzes its main advantages, and discusses potential designs, transmission architectures, and application scenarios. Finally, it outlines promising research directions and open challenges associated with PASS.

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arXiv2025

Movable-Element STARS-Aided Secure Communications

A novel movable-element (ME) enabled simultaneously transmitting and reflecting surface (ME-STARS)-aided secure communication system is investigated. Against the full-space eavesdropping, MEs are deployed at the STARS for enhancing the physical layer security by exploiting higher spatial degrees of freedom. Specifically, a sum secrecy rate maximization problem is formulated, which jointly optimizes the passive beamforming and the MEs positions at the ME-STARS, as well as the active beamforming at the base station. To solve the resultant non-convex optimization problem involving highly-coupled variables, an alternating optimization-based iterative algorithm is developed, decomposing the original problem into three subproblems. In particular, for the MEs position optimization subproblem, a gradient ascent algorithm is employed to iteratively refine the MEs' locations within the confined region. Moreover, the the active and passive beamforming subproblems are solved by employing successive convex approximation. Numerical results unveil that: 1) ME-STARS significantly improves the secrecy performance compared to the conventional STARS with fixed-position elements; and 2) The secrecy rate achieved by the ME-STARS gets saturated within limited movable region size.

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arXiv2025

Downlink and Uplink ISAC in Continuous-Aperture Array (CAPA) Systems

A continuous-aperture array (CAPA)-based integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) framework is proposed for both downlink and uplink scenarios. Within this framework, continuous operator-based signal models are employed to describe the sensing and communication processes. The performance of communication and sensing is analyzed using two information-theoretic metrics: the communication rate (CR) and the sensing rate (SR). 1) For downlink ISAC, three continuous beamforming designs are proposed: i) the communications-centric (C-C) design that maximizes the CR, ii) the sensing-centric (S-C) design that maximizes the SR, and iii) the Pareto-optimal design that characterizes the Pareto boundary of the CR-SR region. A low-complexity signal subspace-based approach is proposed to derive the closed-form optimal beamformers for the considered designs. On this basis, closed-form expressions are derived for the achievable CRs and SRs, and the downlink rate region achieved by CAPAs is characterized. 2) For uplink ISAC, the C-C and S-C successive interference cancellation-based methods are proposed to manage inter-functionality interference. Using the subspace approach closed-form expressions for the optimal detectors as well as the achievable CRs and SRs are derived. The uplink SR-CR region is characterized based on the time-sharing technique. Numerical results demonstrate that, for both downlink and uplink, CAPA-based ISAC achieves higher CRs and SRs as well as larger CR-SR regions compared to conventional spatially discrete array-based ISAC.

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arXiv2025

Beamforming Design for Continuous Aperture Array (CAPA)-Based MIMO Systems

An efficient beamforming design is proposed for continuous aperture array (CAPA)-based point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In contrast to conventional spatially discrete array (SPDA)-MIMO systems, whose optimal beamforming can be obtained using singular-value decomposition, CAPA-MIMO systems require solving the eigendecomposition of a Hermitian kernel operator, which is computationally prohibitive. To address this challenge, an explicit closed-form expression for the achievable rate of CAPA-MIMO systems is first derived as a function of the continuous transmit beamformer. Subsequently, an iterative weighted minimum mean-squared error (WMMSE) algorithm is proposed, directly addressing the CAPA-MIMO beamforming optimization without discretization approximation. Closed-form updates for each iteration of the WMMSE algorithm are derived via the calculus of variations (CoV) method. For low-complexity implementation, an equivalent matrix-based iterative solution is introduced using Gauss-Legendre quadrature. Our numerical results demonstrate that 1) CAPA-MIMO achieves substantial performance gain over the SPDA-MIMO, 2) the proposed WMMSE algorithm enhances performance while significantly reducing computational complexity compared to state-of-the-art Fourier-based approaches, and 3) the proposed WMMSE algorithm enables practical realization of parallel, non-interfering transmissions.

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arXiv2025

An Energy Efficient Design of Hybrid NOMA Based on Hybrid SIC with Power Adaptation

Recently, hybrid non-orthogonal multiple access (H-NOMA) technology, which effectively utilizes both NOMA and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) technologies through flexible resource allocation in a single transmission, has demonstrated immense potential for enhancing the performance of wireless communication systems. To further release the potential of HNOMA, this paper proposes a novel design of H-NOMA which jointly incorporates hybrid successive interference cancellation (HSIC) and power adaptation (PA) in the NOMA transmission phase. To reveal the potential of the proposed HSIC-PA aided H-NOMA scheme, closed-form expression for the probability of the event that H-NOMA can achieve a higher data rate than pure OMA by consuming less energy is rigorously derived. Furthermore, the asymptotic analysis demonstrates that the probability of the proposed H-NOMA scheme approaches 1 in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime without any constraints on either users' target rates or transmit power ratios. This represents a significant improvement over conventional H-NOMA schemes, which require specific restrictive conditions to achieve probability 1 at high SNRs as shown in existing work. The above observation indicates that with less energy consumption, the proposed HSIC-PA aided H-NOMA can achieve a higher data rate than pure OMA with probability 1 at high SNRs, and hence a higher energy efficiency. Finally, numerical results are provided to verify the accuracy of the analysis and also demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed H-NOMA scheme.

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arXiv2025

Robust Resource Allocation for Pinching-Antenna Systems under Imperfect CSI

Pinching-antenna technology has lately showcased its promising capability for reconfiguring wireless propagation environments, especially in high-frequency communication systems like millimeter-wave and terahertz bands. By dynamically placing the antenna over a dielectric waveguide, line-of-sight (LoS) connections can be made to significantly improve system performance. Although recent research have illustrated the advantages of pinching-antenna-assisted designs, they mainly presuppose complete knowledge of user locations -- an impractical assumption in real-world systems. To address this issue, the robust resource allocation in a multi-user pinching antenna downlink system with uncertain user positions is investigated, aiming to minimize total transmit power while satisfying individual outage probability constraints. First, we address the single-user case, deriving the optimal pinching antenna position and obtaining the corresponding power allocation using a bisection method combined with geometric analysis. We then extend this solution to the multi-user case. In this case, we optimize the pinching antenna position using a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to handle the resulting non-convex and non-differentiable optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional fixed-antenna systems and validate the effectiveness of the PSO-based antenna placement strategy under location uncertainty.

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arXiv2025

Pinching-Antenna Systems with LoS Blockages

The aim of this letter is to explore the capability of pinching-antenna systems to construct line-of-sight (LoS) links in the presence of LoS blockages. Specifically, pinching antennas are pre-installed at preconfigured positions along waveguides and can be selectively activated to create LoS links for enhancing desired signals and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) links for eliminating inter-user interference. On this basis, a sum-rate maximization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing waveguide assignment and antenna activation. To solve this problem, a matching based algorithm is proposed using two distinct preference designs. Simulation results demonstrate that the considered pinching-antenna system and proposed solutions can dynamically establish LoS links and effectively exploit LoS blockages to mitigate interference, thereby significantly improving system throughput.

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arXiv2025

Physical Layer Security for Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS)

The pinching-antenna system (PASS) introduces new degrees of freedom (DoFs) for physical layer security (PLS) through pinching beamforming. In this paper, a couple of scenarios for secure beamforming for PASS are studied. 1) For the case with a single legitimate user (Bob) and a single eavesdropper (Eve), a closed-form expression for the optimal baseband beamformer is derived. On this basis, a gradient-based method is proposed to optimize the activated positions of pinching antennas (PAs). 2) For the case with multiple Bobs and multiple Eves, a fractional programming (FP)-based block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm, termed FP-BCD, is proposed for optimizing the weighted secrecy sum-rate (WSSR). Specifically, a closed-form baseband beamformer is obtained via Lagrange multiplier method. Furthermore, owing to the non-convex objective function exhibiting numerous stationary points, a low-complexity one-dimensional search is used to find a high-quality solution of the PAs' activated locations. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate that: i) All proposed algorithms achieve stable convergence within a few iterations, ii) across all considered power ranges, the FP-BCD algorithm outperforms baseline methods using zero-forcing (ZF) and maximal-ratio transmission (MRT) beamforming in terms of the WSSR, and iii) PASS achieves a significantly higher secrecy rate than traditional fixed-antenna systems.

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arXiv2025

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface aided Integrated-Navigation-and-Communication in Urban Canyons: A Satellite Selection Approach

This study investigates the application of a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS)-aided medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) satellite network for providing both global positioning services and communication services in the urban canyons, where the direct satellite-user links are obstructed. Superposition coding (SC) and successive interference cancellation (SIC) techniques are utilized for the integrated navigation and communication (INAC) networks, and the composed navigation and communication signals are reflected or transmitted to ground users or indoor users located in urban canyons. To meet diverse application needs, navigation-oriented (NO)-INAC and communication-oriented (CO)-INAC have been developed, each tailored according to distinct power allocation factors. We then proposed two algorithms, namely navigation-prioritized-algorithm (NPA) and communication-prioritized-algorithm (CPA), to improve the navigation or communication performance by selecting the satellite with the optimized position dilution of precision (PDoP) or with the best channel gain. The effectiveness of the proposed STAR-RIS-aided INAC network is quantified by analyzing the positioning error for navigation services and by evaluating communication performance through achievable ergodic rate metrics. Our satellite selection approach indicates that: the positioning services at the urban canyon users can be completed with the aid of STAR-RIS. 2) Additionally, it is observed that while a single STAR-RIS array can extend the navigational link, it fails to serve users in indoor scenarios, highlighting a limitation in the current system design.

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arXiv2025

ASTARS empowered Satellite Positioning Approach for Urban Canyons and Indoor Environments

To mitigate the loss of satellite navigation signals in urban canyons and indoor environments, we propose an active simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (ASTARS) empowered satellite positioning approach. Deployed on building structures, ASTARS reflects navigation signals to outdoor receivers in urban canyons and transmits signals indoors to bypass obstructions, providing high-precision positioning services to receivers in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) areas. The path between ASTARS and the receiver is defined as the extended line-of-sight (ELoS) path and an improved carrier phase observation equation is derived to accommodate that. The receiver compensates for its clock bias through network time synchronization, corrects the actual signal path distance to the satellite-to-receiver distance through a distance correction algorithm, and determines its position by using the least squares (LS) method. Mathematical modeling of the errors introduced by the proposed method is conducted, followed by simulation analysis to assess their impact. Simulation results show that: 1) in areas where GNSS signals are blocked, with time synchronization accuracy within a 10 ns error range, the proposed method provides positioning services with errors not exceeding 4 m for both indoor and outdoor receivers, outperforming conventional NLoS methods with positioning errors of more than 7 m; 2) the additional errors introduced by the proposed method do not exceed 3 m for time synchronization errors within 10 ns, which includes the phase shift, beamwidth error, time synchronization errors, and satellite distribution errors, outperforming traditional NLoS methods, which typically produce positioning errors greater than 5 m.

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arXiv2025

Multigroup Multicast Design for Pinching-Antenna Systems: Waveguide-Division or Waveguide-Multiplexing?

This article addresses the design of multigroup multicast communications in the pinching-antenna system (PASS). A PASS-enabled multigroup transmission framework is proposed to maximize multicast rates under a couple of transmission architectures: waveguide-division (WD) and waveguide-multiplexing (WM). 1) For WD, an element-wise sequential optimization strategy is proposed for pinching beamforming, i.e., optimizing the activated positions of pinching antennas along dielectric waveguides. Meanwhile, a log-sum-exp projected gradient descent algorithm is proposed for transmit power allocation across waveguides. 2) For WM, a majorization-minimization (MM)-based framework is proposed to tackle the problem's non-smoothness and non-convexity. On this basis, a low-complexity element-wise sequential optimization method is developed for pinching beamforming using the MM surrogate objective. Furthermore, the optimal transmit beamformer structure is derived from the MM surrogate objective using the Lagrange duality, with an efficient transmit beamforming algorithm proposed using projected adaptive gradient descent. Numerical results demonstrate that: i) both WD and WM architectures in PASS achieve significant multicast rate improvements over conventional MIMO techniques, especially for systems with large service areas; ii) WM is more robust than WD in dense deployments, while WD excels when user groups are spatially separated.

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arXiv2025

Capacity Characterization of Pinching-Antenna Systems

Unlike conventional systems using a fixed-location antenna, the channel capacity of the pinching-antenna system (PASS) is determined by the activated positions of pinching antennas. This article characterizes the capacity region of multiuser PASS, where a single pinched waveguide is deployed to enable both uplink and downlink communications. The capacity region of the uplink channel is first characterized. \romannumeral1) For the single-pinch case, closed-form expressions are derived for the optimal antenna activation position, along with the corresponding capacity region and the achievable data rate regions under time-division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency-division multiple access (FDMA). It is proven that the capacity region of PASS encompasses that of conventional fixed-antenna systems, and that the FDMA rate region contains the TDMA rate region. \romannumeral2) For the multiple-pinch case, inner and outer bounds on the capacity region are derived using an element-wise alternating antenna position optimization technique and the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, respectively. The achievable FDMA rate region is also derived using the same optimization framework, while the TDMA rate region is obtained through an antenna position refinement approach. The analysis is then extended to the downlink PASS using the uplink-downlink duality framework. It is proven that the relationships among the downlink capacity and rate regions are consistent with those in the uplink case. Numerical results demonstrate that: \romannumeral1) the derived bounds closely approximate the exact capacity region, \romannumeral2) PASS yields a significantly enlarged capacity region compared to conventional fixed-antenna systems, and \romannumeral3) in the multiple-pinch case, TDMA and FDMA are capable of approaching the channel capacity limit.

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arXiv2025

Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS) Meet Multiple Access: NOMA or OMA?

A fundamental two-user PASS-based communication system is considered under three MA schemes, namely non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), frequency division multiple access (FDMA), and time division multiple access (TDMA). For each MA scheme, a pinching beamforming optimization problem is formulated to minimize the required transmit power for satisfying users' rate requirements. For NOMA and FDMA, a two-stage algorithm is proposed, where the locations of PAs are derived sequentially by using the successive convex approximation (SCA) method and fine-turning phase adjustment. For TDMA, by leveraging the time-switching feature of PASS, the optimal pinching beamforming of each time slot is derived to maximize the served user channel gain. Numerical results are provided to show that: 1) PASS can achieve a significant performance gain over conventional antenna systems, and 2) NOMA consistently outperforms FDMA, while TDMA provides superior performance than NOMA for symmetric user rate requirements.

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arXiv2025

Modeling and Beamforming Optimization for Pinching-Antenna Systems

The Pinching-Antenna SyStem (PASS) is a revolutionary flexible antenna technology designed to enhance wireless communication by establishing strong line-of-sight (LoS) links, reducing free-space path loss and enabling antenna array reconfigurability. PASS uses dielectric waveguides with low propagation loss for signal transmission, radiating via a passive pinching antenna, which is a small dielectric element applied to the waveguide. This paper first proposes a physics-based hardware model for PASS, where the pinching antenna is modeled as an open-ended directional coupler, and the electromagnetic field behavior is analyzed using coupled-mode theory. A simplified signal model characterizes the coupling effect between multiple antennas on the same waveguide. Based on this, two power models are proposed: equal power and proportional power models. Additionally, a transmit power minimization problem is formulated/studied for the joint optimization of transmit and pinching beamforming under both continuous and discrete pinching antenna activations. Two algorithms are proposed to solve this multimodal optimization problem: the penalty-based alternating optimization algorithm and a low-complexity zero-forcing (ZF)-based algorithm. Numerical results show that 1) the ZF-based low-complexity algorithm performs similarly to the penalty-based algorithm, 2) PASS reduces transmit power by over 95% compared to conventional and massive MIMO, 3) discrete activation causes minimal performance loss but requires a dense antenna set to match continuous activation, and 4) the proportional power model yields performance comparable to the equal power model.

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arXiv2025

Near-Field Sensing Enabled Predictive Beamforming: Fundamentals, Framework, and Opportunities

The article proposes a novel near-field predictive beamforming framework for high-mobility wireless networks. Specifically, due to the spherical waves and non-uniform Doppler frequencies brought by the near-field region, the new ability of full-dimensional location and velocity sensing is characterized. Building on this foundation, the near-field predictive beamforming framework is proposed to proactively design beamformers for mobility users following arbitrary trajectories. Compared to the conventional far-field counterpart, the near-field predictive beamforming stands out due to: i) Prior-Knowledge-Free Prediction, and ii) Low-Complexity and Generalizable System Design. To realize these advantages, the implementation methods are discussed, followed by a case study confirming the benefits of the proposed framework. Finally, the article highlights promising research opportunities inspired by the proposed framework.

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arXiv2025

Multiuser Beamforming for Pinching-Antenna Systems: An Element-wise Optimization Framework

The pinching-antenna system (PASS) reconstructs wireless channels through pinching beamforming, i.e., optimizing the activated locations of pinching antennas (PAs) along the waveguide. The aim of this article is to investigate the joint design of baseband beamforming and pinching beamforming. A low-complexity element-wise sequential optimization framework is proposed to address the sum-rate maximization problem in PASS-enabled downlink and uplink channels. i) For the downlink scenario, maximum ratio transmission (MRT), zero-forcing (ZF), and minimum mean square error (MMSE) beamforming schemes are employed as baseband beamformers. For each beamformer, a closed-form expression for the downlink sum-rate is derived as a single-variable function with respect to the pinching beamformer. Based on this, a sequential optimization method is proposed, where the positions of the PAs are updated element-wise using a low-complexity one-dimensional search. ii) For the uplink scenario, signal detection is performed using maximum ratio combining (MRC), ZF, and MMSE combiners. A closed-form sum-rate expression is derived for each linear combiner, and a similar element-wise design is applied to optimize the pinching beamforming. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and demonstrate that: (i) For all considered linear beamformers, the proposed PASS architecture outperforms conventional fixed-antenna systems in terms of sum-rate performance; (ii) in both downlink and uplink channels, ZF achieves performance close to that of MMSE and significantly outperforms MRT or MRC; and (iii) the proposed element-wise design eliminates the need for alternating updates between the baseband and pinching beamformers, thereby ensuring low computational complexity.

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arXiv2025

On the Performance of Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS) with Orthogonal and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

This paper conducts a comprehensive performance analysis for pinching-antenna systems (PASS) under both orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission. Given the cost of waveguides, we consider a scenario where the waveguide is not deployed in all rooms, i.e., some users are beyond the line-of-sight (LoS) link service area of the PASS. Specifically, we consider a PASS where a pinching antenna in one room serves two users located in separate rooms. The wireless transmissions between the pinching antenna and the users are performed via LoS and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) links, respectively. Closed-form expressions for the outage probabilities (OPs) of the two users are derived for the considered system. Furthermore, asymptotic analyses in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime are performed to reveal the achievable diversity orders. Numerical simulations validate the accuracy of the theoretical analysis and show that: 1) compared with conventional antenna systems (CASS), the OP of the LoS user in PASS is significantly reduced for both OMA and NOMA schemes in the middle SNR regime and approaches zero as the SNR increases; 2) since the diversity orders of the NLoS user in CASS and PASS are the same, the movement of the pinching antenna has no significant effect on the OP of the NLoS user for the OMA and NOMA scenarios.

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arXiv2025

Joint Beamforming for NOMA Assisted Pinching Antenna Systems (PASS)

Pinching antenna system (PASS) configures the positions of pinching antennas (PAs) along dielectric waveguides to change both large-scale fading and small-scale scattering, which is known as pinching beamforming. A novel non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted PASS framework is proposed for downlink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. The transmit power minimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize the transmit beamforming, pinching beamforming, and power allocation. To solve this highly nonconvex problem, both gradient-based and swarm-based optimization methods are developed. 1) For gradient-based method, a majorization-minimization and penalty dual decomposition (MM-PDD) algorithm is developed. The Lipschitz gradient surrogate function is constructed based on MM to tackle the nonconvex terms of this problem. Then, the joint optimization problem is decomposed into subproblems that are alternatively optimized based on PDD to obtain stationary closed-form solutions. 2) For swarm-based method, a fast-convergent particle swarm optimization and zero forcing (PSO-ZF) algorithm is proposed. Specifically, the PA position-seeking particles are constructed to explore high-quality pinching beamforming solutions. Moreover, ZF-based transmit beamforming is utilized by each particle for fast fitness function evaluation. Simulation results demonstrate that: i) The proposed NOMA assisted PASS and algorithms outperforms the conventional NOMA assisted massive antenna system. The proposed framework reduces over 95.22% transmit power compared to conventional massive MIMO-NOMA systems. ii) Swarm-based optimization outperforms gradient-based optimization by searching effective solution subspace to avoid stuck in undesirable local optima.

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